Due to less than satisfactory water quality in many cities in the United States, and elsewhere, individuals often purchase bottled drinking water which comes from a wide variety of sources. Often such customers buy spring water which is bottled in five gallon plastic containers that are mounted in dispensing units in offices and homes, whereby the water in bottles can be dispensed into cups or the like placed under the spigot of the dispensing unit, commonly called the "water cooler."
Since a customer has to lift the bottles and invert them on the water cooler, after the cap is removed, to replenish the water in the cooler, the five gallon size for the bottles is preferred, if not mandated. Not counting the weight of the bottles, the water contained in these bottles weighs approximately forty-four (44) pounds, not an insubstantial amount to lift and guide into the top opening of the water cooler. For this reason the plastic bottles used for such water handling are light weight, weighing only a few pounds, which dictates the thin walled plastic bottles conventionally used to distribute bottled water.
Due to the thin wall of the plastic bottles coupled with the weight of the water, these bottles are somewhat fragile and must be handled with care to avoid rupturing the bottles and/or disrupting the seal of the cap. The above characteristics relating to the bottles and the weight of the water poses problems in the initial distribution phases of providing such bottled water to customers.
The delivery process for such bottled water involves filling the plastic bottles with spring water, or the like, capping the bottles with plastic caps and loading them into racks for delivery to customers. Typically the rack (two of which are illustrated in the drawings, FIGS. 1 and 2, described infra,) hold 24 bottles of water (sometimes more depending on the rack size), with each bottle supported by rails in an individual compartment holding two bottles. These racks are typically equipped with spaced apart tunnels or feet at the bottom of the rack for a fork lift by which the racks are loaded on the sides of a delivery truck with a slight inward incline. As a result the delivery driver may access the two bottles in each compartment from the side of the delivery truck. Empty bottles are stored in the racks for return to the bottling plant when full bottles are exchanged for empty bottles at a customer's location.
Small bottled water producers often load the racks by hand with a crew receiving the filled bottles from a filling line, lifting the bottles and guiding them into the compartments in the racks and then pushing them back along the rails so that two bottles can be placed in each compartment. When the racks have compartments four high, the crew must lift the roughly fifty pound bottles four plus feet in the air to place them in the racks. Such manual loading requires considerable physical exertion to load a single rack containing twenty-four water filled bottles. Since the bottles are somewhat fragile, the crew must not "bang" the bottles against the rack or its rails, lest the bottles rupture or the hydraulic action of the water within the bottle breaks or disturbs the cap seal, leading to leakage of the water from the bottle.
Obviously the labor intensive loading of these bottles in racks manually, places the crew at risk for on the job injury from the difficult and repetitive lifting involved. Larger bottled water producers therefore have resorted to large machines for automatically loading water filled bottles of the type described into racks, some machines costing in the range of $250,000. Such machines often consume significant floor space and require high vertical clearances for the machine, e.g., vertical clearances of two stories or more. One such prior art machine is disclosed in U.S. Letters Pat. No. 4,929,140 issued to Baker and another is disclosed in U.S. Letters Pat. No. 5,244,330 issued to Tonjes.
This invention is related to a machine for automatically loading the water filled bottles into the delivery racks mentioned above which is far less expensive than the machines disclosed in the patents mentioned.
Thus, an object of this invention is to provide a bottle water loading machine which has a small horizontal and vertical footprint which is affordable for small bottled water producers.
Further, another object of this invention is to provide a special mechanism which orients the water filled bottles gently from a vertical orientation to a horizontal position in order to avoid rupture of the bottles and/or creating cap "leakers" during an automatic loading process.
Still another object of the invention is to provide a machine which costs only about a third of the price of the machines now available in the market place.
A very important feature of the novel machine is its open architecture which allows for easy maintenance and repair.
Other advantages and objects of the invention will be appreciated by referring to the accompanying drawings and the following specification describing the invention, including a feature allowing the machine to accommodate different rack configurations when desired by the operator.